News & Events

Thursday, Feb. 21, 2013, at 6 p.m., in Fahy 236, Slavic Club and
Russian and East European Studies Program will be presenting to the SHU community the Peabody Award winning director, Robin Hessman and her award-winning, very interesting and educational 90-minute documentary, My
Perestroika, which is an intimate look at the last generation of Soviet
children. Five classmates go from living sheltered childhoods to
experiencing the hopes of Gorbachev's reforms and the confusion of the
USSR's dissolution, to searching for their places in today's Moscow.
With candor and humor, the punk rocker, single mother, entrepreneur and
married teachers paint a picture of the challenges, dreams and
disappointments of those raised behind the Iron Curtain. Through
first-person testimony, vérité footage and vintage home movies, this
beautifully crafted documentary reveals a Russia rarely seen on film.

Woven from nearly 200 hours of footage of former Russian schoolmates
filmed from 2005 to 2008, hundreds of reels of home movies from the
1970s and 1980s and dozens of Soviet propaganda films of the era, My
Perestroika is a nuanced account of a tumultuous time — the last years
of the Soviet system — as experienced by a generation coming of age just
as its country broke apart. The film is also an affecting portrait of
the paths five young people took when their world turned upside down.

Perestroika literally means restructuring in Russian, and it was also
the term used to define the political and social changes that followed
the collapse of the USSR. This documentary captures the ideology and
feelings of a small group of Russians who are of the right age to
remember the zeitgeist of Russia both before and after the wall fell.
Incredible archival footage shows the society that the Communist Party
was trying to build, and it is wonderfully inter cut with the director’s
modern footage to build the case that Russia is Russia, and it seems
like it will always be that way, regardless of who is running the show.

A co-production of Red Square Productions/Bungalow Town Productions
and ITVS International in association with American Documentary | POV.

It came out in 2010 and had its PBS Premiere in June 28, 2011. This
year, it has received a Peabody Award, the highest honor for broadcast
films.

After its viewing, our Q&A session will be conducted by documentary's director, Robin Hessman.